Every so often I find myself doing a search for finding the right command to copy a file from another branch to the current working branch in my Git workflows. It might be to go back to a working version if I messed it up, or to revert all my changes if I was working on something temporary.

git checkout <source-branch> -- <file-path>

where

<source-branch>: The name of the branch where the file currently exists.
<file-path>: The path to the file you want to copy (relative to the repository root).

This command will copy the file from the specified branch into your current branch’s working directory.

Example

Assuming we are on the main branch. And we want to copy a file src/config/settings.json from the branch feature-branch.

Run:

git checkout feature-branch -- src/config/settings.json

The file src/config/settings.json from feature-branch will now be in the working directory on main.